


We'll Never Grow Old

by ashesandhoney



Category: Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare, Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: F/M, Gen, Immortal BFFs, Not Canon Compliant, Slow Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-16 16:05:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3494507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Imagine that Simon Lewis was never unvamped and decades later, after a long happy life with Isabelle and his friends, Simon found himself alone. Imagine Simon meeting Tessa Gray in some strange corner of the world. Imagine the friendship they might strike up and the relationship that would build out of that very slowly. </p><p>This is a series of ficlets about these two - spread out over time - new additions will be added in where they fit chronologically.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 2090 - In a Diner

**Author's Note:**

> I realize the list of people who ship these two is myself, the four people on tumblr who convinced me to ship these two, and maybe a duck somewhere.

2090  
Portland

In a Downworld diner she smiled at the accent first, not because she recognized the voice. A New Yorker. She had bouncing around places like Australia and Brazil and Tunisia for more than a decade, weathering a loss too big to be borne. And yet she had. She had survived it as she had survived others. It had been a long time since she had been in America and the accent was like a welcome home.

She turned in from her book to say something about the bridges or the boroughs and had stopped in mid sentence. He looked the same as he always had. He was a vampire and they didn’t change much. He was almost exactly her height. His hair seemed to perpetually need a cut and he carried a guitar case. She had always thought of him as one of the Lightwoods. He had been a part of her life, not a close friend but still a friend. One who recommended comic books and then argued with her when she didn't like them. Her children had visited his home when they were small and his niece was her god-daughter. They were family. She hadn't seen him in 20 years. 

"Simon Lewis," she said.

"Tessa Carstairs?" he asked and the waitress looked between them for a moment before scampering off. The name hurt more than she expected but she wrapped that up and pushed it down so she could smile at him. 

She hadn’t fallen out of contact with the families they had shared but she hadn’t spoken to him in a very long time. There were now great grandchildern of that loose collective of Lightwoods and Herondales and Fairchilds they had both been a part of once. They still sometimes called themselves Team Good. Tessa’s daughters were old ladies now but they still sent her messages to the tablet in her bag to make sure she didn’t drop too far off the radar as she roamed the world. 

"What are doing out here?" Tessa asked coming to sit at his table. At his feet there was a guitar case and a backpack with sewn on patches old enough to be antiques.

"Going to become a vampire rock god, start a new trend in midnight concerts and confections that look like blood," he said with a fake Transylvanian accent and she laughed. He looked at her - incredulous - which made her laugh again. Did he no longer have friends who understood his terrible jokes? She hoped that wasn’t true. He was pretending not to be swimming in loss and she could see the pain just behind his eyes. Clary Fray had lived to be almost a hundred but even she was gone now. She had been the last one. He was pretending but then so was she so she didn’t bring it up.

They sat and talked about everything but the people who weren’t at the table. They talked about music trends and American politics and what they knew about the breakthroughs being done on Mars. Simon made jokes and grinned at Tessa each time she laughed. 

"Where are you staying?" she asked.

"Motel 6 by the highway," he said.

"Come home with me," she said, "I promise my guest room is better than theirs. We’ll look up this Avengers movie that I’ve never seen and won’t like. I’ll make popcorn and you can be bitter about not being able to eat it."

The argument over superheros was old. Older than the building they sat in but it made Simon smile. Tessa had always hated stories with capes and tights and Simon had always sworn it was unfair prejudice. Her insistence that he give classic literature a chance was the reverse argument. He complained about the wordiness and how slow the stories were and she told him he was being lazy and tried to convince him that the language was beautiful. 

She took him home and they sat on the sofa in her little rental house and threw popcorn at the movie whenever Tessa thought it was being silly. They had been family, tied together by all the people between them but those people were almost all gone now. Sitting there while he laughed made it seem like maybe they could be friends and Tessa needed a friend. 


	2. 2104 - A Funeral

2104

Lisbon, Portugal

 

Simon punched in the key code she had given him and shouldered into the apartment. He had a case of beer in one hand and a bag of chips in the other. They were going to spend the night marathoning one of the few television series that they both enjoyed and he'd been looking forward to it for a week. She'd called him and told him to get on a plane to Lisbon to come see her so he had.

"Gray?" he called out. Sometimes, rarely, but it was always painful when it happened, he called her Fray instead. Today though, the name came out as it was meant to.

Simon found Tessa sitting on the floor with her little tablet in her hand. She rarely bothered with technology but that piece of metal and glass went everywhere she did. She looked up at him. She wore a blue sweater and her eyes were storm cloud gray above it. Her face was empty, no emotion, a flat mask. He dropped everything on the floor and knelt down in front of her.

"Charlotte died this afternoon," she said holding out the tablet in case he needed proof. He took it from her gently and put it to the side without looking at the screen. Then he gathered her into his arms. It was awkward. They were not physical friends. There was a barrier between them that they never discussed. It had been a very long time since he'd held anyone for any reason. Then her stiffness disappeared and she curled into his arms. The awkwardness was gone as though it had never been there. She tucked her head into his shoulder and held him back.

She did not cry. Charlotte was her youngest daughter. The one who had chosen to live her life among the Nephilim. The one who called every year on birthdays and holidays to make sure her mother was alright. Simon could remember Char when she was little, climbing everything in sight and then falling perfectly still whenever music played so that she could listen to it properly. Tessa was silent but Simon was not and once the tears were running down his cheeks they sparked something in her.

Once the dam broke, she sobbed. They held each other and once the tears had gone Tessa lay with her head on Simon's shoulder in the big soft papasan chair that they were sharing. They talked of loss. Outside the Lisbon sky had clouded over and rain ticked against the window as they talked about Charlotte and the others that they had lost. It had been a taboo between them, like the unspoken rule about not touching but now both of them were gone. They talked and they held onto each other and they listened to the rain.

 

When Tessa went to the funeral, Simon went with her so she didn't need to be alone. They stood at the back, away from all the people who had grown old with Charlotte Carstairs. Magnus Bane joined them and pulled Tessa in to kiss the side of her head. Anna Lightwood joined them a little later. She had grown up with Charlotte. She had babysat the younger girl, had given her dating advice when she got to be a teen. Anna fell in beside Magnus and leaned an elbow on her father's shoulder. He looked at her with sad eyes because he knew why she'd been late. She couldn't pass through the City of Bones without stopping to see the place where her other father was buried.

The three warlocks and the vampire all stood in a little knot, away from the mortals but not alone.

 

 


	3. 2132 - The Retro Bar

2132

London, England 

Simon stepped away from the little knot of people who claimed they had come just to see him and not the rest of the early 2000s side show that the Retro Bar was putting on that night. She was dressed out of time but it was a simple dress with clean lines and plain colours and it looked more classic than antique. He smiled at her and suddenly the girls who had been leaning in and asking questions were all secondary. Sparkling stars eclipsed by the sun. He shook his head. Where had that thought come from? He came to stand beside her and lean against the wall. He wanted to pretend he was cool even if it was an outdated kind of cool.

"Your friend looks disappointed," she said and he shrugged.

"I'm old enough to be her grandfather," he said, "And she's got terrible taste."

"You just played Wonderwall on an acoustic guitar at an open mic night," Tessa said with a pointed look. She had very strong opinions on taste. He liked her in spite of them. Their friendship had been built on a shared past for a long time and then suddenly it wasn't. Suddenly they were just friends regardless of the past. He couldn't say when it had happened or why only that it had. She was his anchor when the past tried to pull him down, his sounding board for ridiculous ideas, his best friend.

"I could have chosen Smoke on the Water," he said.

"I don't know which is more cliche," she said.

"Wonderwall is always the bigger cliche, always," he said and then waved a hand at the cafe, "But that is what this place specializes in. It specializes in horrible cliches over 50 years old. I am a major draw with my early 2000s chic." He straightened his t-shirt and his showed her his artfully ripped jeans. He could have stepped back into his high school classes and not have been out of place. He was damn historically accurate, not that anyone cared. The Lady Gaga impersonator climbing up onto stage after him certainly didn't.

"Do you think I'd be draw if I wore a corset and made silhouettes?" she asked.

He knew what she meant. He knew that she meant a corset and a dress and a very proper outfit but his imagination provided him with just a flash of a different sort of corseted outfit. He did not blush but that was only because he lacked the blood flow for it. Tessa Gray was all soft curves and would have looked very good in a corset and stockings and not much else. Very good.

"Silhouettes?" he managed to say around his rampant imagination. He was not 16, he might look 16 but he was not 16 and should not have been so distracted by just the word. He looked at her face and focused on her eyes and ignored his mind as best he could. She was Tessa. He did not think thoughts like that about Tessa. What was wrong with him tonight?

"It was all the rage in the 1800s," she said. "You would trace and cut out silhouettes of your friends. Like selfies but more convoluted and with fewer artistic filters. People actually made a living at it. Poor Man's Portraits they were called."

Simon laughed, "Actually yes, you should go offer it. If you've got the dress for it, they'd probably be able to sell tickets for an 19th century event. They'd play chamber music and have someone run around dressed as Oscar Wilde butchering his more outrageous one liners. It sounds like fun. I'd go."

"You could wear a suit and a collar," she said looking at him with a little smile like she was picturing him dressed very differently. She always sounded just a little bit more British when she spoke of the distant past. Tessa was twice his age and her past went back farther than his did. He forgot sometimes just how much older she was until she brought something like that up. Silhouettes were a long forgotten hobby by the time he was born. The fashions she remembered from her youth had been museum displays for him.

"I'd look good in one," he said.

"Yes, you would," she said and she pushed her fingers up into his hair so it mimicked a properly brushed style as she considered him with a smile.

Don't do it, he told the little thing in his chest that curled and tried to wake up under that look. Don't fall in love with your best friend again. It had gone terribly when he'd been a kid and that time the friend he'd fallen in love with hadn't been this far out of his league. This was a woman who had fallen in love with gentlemen in carriages and evening wear, men who wrote her poetry and symphonies and knew how to dance a waltz. She had manners and culture and history that he couldn't touch. He was over a hundred and still a child standing beside her.

"Come have a glass of some quaint old-timey drink with me, rum and coke perhaps or beer," he said.

"They still make beer, they've made beer for millenia, I don't know that it's old-timey," she said.

"Yes well, this place has real coke, come have real coke with me," he said and he grabbed her arm and pulled her towards the bar. She let him. She even leaned into him a little as he pulled her across the bar and he had to talk himself down again as he ordered and she found a table. Then one more time as he brought the ridiculously expensive glass of sugar water over to her where she sat leaned back in a chair with her hair like a curtain around her face.

"Thank you for inviting me, Si," she said looking around the bar with it's touches from a mishmash of trends and eras. It was a place that promised patrons quaint and old-timey and delivered the bright colours of the 2020s and the loud patterns of the 2040s with a hint of the 2060s tendency toward using lights in all decorating all mixed into an aesthetic hodgepodge that was both hideous and enchanting.

"I'm always happy to have you," Simon told her and then ducked his head into his glass to avoid looking at her. She touched his hand and seemed not to notice that he was morphing into a 16 year old with a crush before her very eyes. Don't do it, he told his heart again but it wasn't listening. It was watching her purse her lips and frown in bafflement at the rendition of Bad Romance going on the stage.

"That may be a silly shirt you're wearing but at least you're talented," she said leaning her head back to look at him and he gave up fighting his heart for at least the evening. He hoped it would be a short lived crush because it already hurt a little bit. 


	4. 2167 - Demon Hunt

2167

San Antonio

 

Tessa sank down and leaned against his shoulder. She looked up at the ceiling and watched the lights cast by passing cars make the shadows of the tree branches dance. Suburbia. She hated suburbia. On the floor near them was a dead woman. She had died screaming and the room was splattered with blood and something viscous and silver.

“Too slow,” Simon said looking down.

“We aren’t always,” Tessa told him.

“Doesn’t matter for her,” he said

“It mattered to Annabeth, to Lauren, to that girl in Cincinnati,” she said.

They were nearly motionless as they sat on the dead woman’s sofa. Simon was a vampire. He was very good at still and Tessa was more than 300 years old. She was patient enough to sit without moving. Her long hair was held in a braid and when she took Simon’s hand the pearls on her bracelet brushed his wrist. Simon glared at the floor, at the things they would have to do to hide this so the mundanes never knew.

“Do you ever think we should just stop this?” Simon asked.

“And what? Go live on a beach and pretend that bad things don’t happen?” she asked.

“Leave it to the Shadowhunters and the Councils?” he suggested. Tessa looked over at him and raised her eyebrows. He laughed. In spite of how tired he looked, how angry he was, he laughed because he was Simon. He looked even younger than she did and she absently reached out to play with the bit of brown hair that flopped over his forehead. He leaned into her hand just a bit. They didn’t talk about these moments but they didn’t stop them either.

“Fine, that’s a ridiculous suggestion,” he said, “I just want this bastard thing dead before it kills anyone else. It tortured her. Look at the way the blood is, it didn’t just kill her because it was hungry, it made sure that it hurt.”

“It’s a demon, Simon,” she said. “Yanluo has been hurting people for a very long time. It likes it.”

Simon didn’t know why it was personal that this particular demon had made it back into the mortal realm. She never shared why this battle hurt more than the others but he knew that it did. He lifted his arm without disengaging their tangled fingers and dropped his arm over her shoulder. He held her tight before they stood up to do what needed to be done to sweep it all under the rug. 


	6. 2176 - I Love You

2176

London

Simon had gotten used to the little text messages, always written out in grammatically flawless English, that invited him to random corners of the world. He was more than used to them. He waited for them. Tessa would vanish from his life for months and then a message would pop up and she'd invite him to some new town to see some new thing or an old thing or just to watch movies and argue about whether or not they were any good. He had it set to make a different noise for her than any other message he received. He was smiling before he picked up the device each time he heard it.

He sent her messages when she was gone and sometimes he'd even invite her to something and she would show up. Serious and considering until her face lit up and the laugh like music spilled out. Dressed in tailored clothing that was never quite fashionable but always stylish, she was always elegant and he would always be a nerd kid from Brooklyn. They were oceans apart but it didn't seem to matter once the arguments or the jokes or the little challenges started.

The message had an address. Albion Cafe on the southbank of the Thames in London. Simon had been to London but it was home for her. He smiled at the message for a long time. It was short and direct. No indication of what she wanted beyond his company. He looked the cafe up and tried to guess. The Tate Modern maybe? But then Tessa never invited him to the tourist spots. He packed that night though he wouldn’t need to leave for two days.

 

He sat in the cafe and sipped at his plain coffee and played a game on his phone. The technology might change but there was always a game to be played on a phone. The message interrupted him in the middle of a boss battle but he didn't quite care.

"Would you meet me by the bridge?" it read.

"cu in 5," he sent back in the most abbreviated chatspeak he could manage because he could picture her rolling her eyes at the phone after she'd deciphered it.

He had gone by the bridge on his way to the cafe. She stood at the corner where it came down to the road. Simon blinked at it because there was something familiar about it now that he was standing here. He looked at her closely. Sad. Eyes like storm clouds instead of sea side mornings. She held her jacket close to her, her arms crossed over her stomach.

"You got married on this bridge," he said instead of a greeting. He felt impossibly dumb for not having put it together sooner. He’d only ever been invited to one wedding held on a bridge but there are a lot of bridges in the world and this one wasn't familiar to him.

"When I was 16 years old, I feared that I was a monster," she said which wasn’t an answer but her eyes were faraway. He knew that look. She was somewhere else, with someone else in some time long gone.

"I've been there, the monster thing, not fun," he said and she gave him a smile and reached out a hand in a navy blue mitten and he took it and came stand nearer to her. She held tight to his hand and looked back out at the expanse of stone and concrete as though she was seeing something very different than he did.

"A boy I barely knew brought me here. He told me that this was his favourite place in all of London. It wasn't remarkable. Just a bridge and it was late and foggy but he brought me here and told me that I was human in all the ways that mattered," she said.

"Jem was right about most things," Simon said and she nodded, the sadness deepened on her face but there were no tears. He waited for her to continue. There was something she wanted to say. There was a reason he had been invited here on this day to this place. He waited for her to say what she wanted to say.

"When I met Will, I fell hard and fast. We never had a time where we were just friends. Jem was my friend before he was more than that. I cared for him but loving him took me by surprise," she said, "Someone said, I can't even remember who it was anymore but I remember his words, 'Most people are lucky to have even one great love in their life. You have found two.' And I thought that was the extent of luck that one person could ever be granted. But then there's you."

Simon blinked slowly and looked at her. She met his eyes, steady and calm. He wasn't but he held himself still and tried to say something but there were no words coming. She looked down at their hands and pulled off her mittens to wrap her warm hands around his icy ones. He swallowed hard but still couldn’t find words.

"You're my friend. You are one of the greatest friends I have ever had in close to 300 years of being alive. I didn't notice it at first, Si, I didn't. Now I can't ignore it. I am always happy to see you. Always. I wanted to know if I could be happy to see you here as well. In this city where I lived a lifetime with someone I loved more than my own soul and in this place where the person I loved and waited for for centuries finally found me. Would I still be happy to see you?" she said.

Simon pushed her hair back from her face where the wind had gotten hold of it and waited. He stared at her and she had her eyes shut.

"Are you?" he asked.

She opened her eyes, tears had gathered in the corners but she nodded. She tried to blink them away and one fell. Simon caught it with a thumb and pushed it off her cheek and she leaned into his hand just a little bit and every time she had ever done that took on a different light. He stepped in just a little closer to her.

"Yes, I am glad that you're here. Even here,” she said. His hand was still on her cheek and even in the winter weather, her skin was warmer than his. He didn’t stop himself from stroking her skin with his thumb. He had touched her before but he’d always stopped himself before he did something like that. Her hair whipped around them when it was caught by a gust of wind and temporarily blotted out everything in the world that wasn’t her.

“I will never love anyone the way that I loved Jem nor the way that I loved Will but I love you Simon Lewis. I love your honesty and your bravery and your terrible jokes and your strength," she ducked her head down and he found himself staring at the top of her head. "I don't expect you to return it but I needed to say it aloud."

He caught her chin and turned her face up to look at him. There were tears on her face again. Tears for the ones she had lost and tears for something she thought she couldn't have. He tried for words but they weren't there so he kissed her instead. He had always stopped himself from imagining this. He had always told himself that she was out of his league. He had always pushed down every thought of pulling her in like this.

She was warm and she was gentle and it had been so long since he had had a kiss that meant something. Her cheeks were wet but her hair was silk soft as he pushed his fingers back into it to cup her head and her arms came up around his neck as she held on. There was no urgency. Careful and slow but there was so much tenderness in it that it made his heart ache.

There was a smile on her mouth as she kissed him one last time and leaned back. She looked at him and the tears were no longer falling though they weren't gone. She laughed and leaned her head in so her forehead touched his where the mark of Cain had once been. He pulled her in and they stood on the side of the street with their arms around each other as the afternoon foot traffic wove around them.

"I love you," he told her, "I love your pretentious taste in literature and your indomitable kindness. I noticed, Gray. You might not have but I did. I noticed every time you fell asleep on my shoulder and every time you laughed at one of my terrible jokes. I didn't expect you to return it."

He used her phrasing because he couldn't pull up his own. Poetic speeches about love were not his strong suit. There were sarcastic comments to be made, little jokes and observations but he didn't want any of them. He wanted the poetry and he couldn't come up with anything worth saying so he held her close.

They fell asleep in each other’s arms that night, nothing more and nothing less.

 


	7. Video Games

Simon was getting used to Tessa being there. Not sporadically but consistently a part of his life. He was getting used to her being the first thing he saw when he woke up. They had a loft apartment in Vancouver that was high enough to see the mountains over the rest of the skyline. Tessa made jokes about rain and sometimes stared out the windows for hours while her mind was somewhere else. 

He was not getting used to her habit of not wearing pants or shirts that dropped off her shoulders and left enough throat bare to make his inner vampire curious. She was utterly comfortable in her own skin and she was utterly comfortable with him. 

She dropped down beside him on the chair that wasn’t big enough for two people and he had to lift his controller up to make room for her bare legs on his lap. He tried to keep playing but had to pause the game. She was a distraction and she was doing it on purpose. 

“Teach me how to play,” she said. 

“Are you serious?” he asked. 

“I have played Angry Birds, I have never played video games with controllers, you do it all the time. I want to try, teach me,” she said. 

She was earnest and sitting on his lap and smelled like lavender and even if all those things weren’t true, she was hard to say no to. He said nothing but turned back to the screen and went back to the main screen to choose something with less gun fights and more story because he wanted her to like it. Then he handed her the controller and she slid a little farther into his lap so she sat between his legs. 

He leaned into her and put his chin on her shoulder. This was all still new but he liked it. She cuddled more than any girl he’d ever been with. Isabelle never showed affection like this and he still found Tessa’s touchy-feely-ness surprising. Nice. Good but surprising. Once they were alone, she shed more clothing and snuggled far closer than he would have expected for someone so reserved in public.

“Fake gamer girl,” he said. 

“Pardon me?” she asked.

“It’s an old joke, people used to accuse girls of only liking video games because they wanted boys to like them,” he said. 

“Don’t most people play video games in their pajamas in their living rooms on Tuesday nights or is that just you?” she asked. 

“That’s most people,” Simon said. 

“It doesn’t seem like a good hobby to choose if you want to attract a husband,” she said. Simon laughed because of course Tessa would have a strange view on it. She had been raised in a century where women had been expected to choose their hobbies with the intention of attracting a man. Becoming accomplished at painting or cooking or piano was all to impress a man. It wasn’t as surprising or offensive to her as it was to the girls Simon grew up with who saw it as an insult. 

He leaned around her to help her find buttons sometimes but the screens were pretty self explanatory once she got the buttons working. She laughed at the jokes of the characters on screen and leaned back to ask Simon more questions about stories than she asked about controls.” Why was there a dragon outside the village?” wasn’t a question he could answer as easily as how to open the menu screens. 

She cuddled and she played with the same intense attention she turned on everything she did. Simon played with her hair and stroked her arms and her bare knees while she explored every corner of every map. She was comfortable and easy until she lost a battle and then her competitiveness kicked in. She got frustrated and then did it again and again until she won. 

Eventually they played together but rarely as opponents. They were on the same team and they both yelled at the screen. They found they could spend hours talking games. Tessa talked about plot and graphics and visual story development. Simon talked about strategy and physics engines. Unlike movies and books where they often found themselves agreeing to disagree - this they could share. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you fully explained how people use "fake gamer girl" as an insult, Tessa would be pissed at you for calling her that but the way Simon explains it here, it doesn't occur to her to be offended by it.


End file.
